…and the house he shares with his people.

New microwave!

Ever do an improvement, step back, and think to yourself… “hmm. Does this actually look better?”

We had one of those moments this weekend, but it was somewhat unavoidable. Our microwave died last week — no sparks, nothing spectacular — just dropped dead in the middle of warming up a cup of coffee. The lights went out, and no one was home. It’s 10 years old, and has been tripping the kitchen electrical circuit (we think) for a while, so it was time for it to go.

We’ve been at 50/50 on appliance finishes for about 2 years now: a stainless steel fridge and dishwasher, and the bisque range and microwave that came with the house.

We have only been buying appliances on an as-needed basis, since it seems silly to buy new ones just because I’d prefer stainless steel. Two and two was really not bad anyway. I always sort of imagined that the range would eventually go (we’ve been running at 3 burners’ capacity for a while), and when we bought a replacement, we’d just do a matching (smaller-ticket item) microwave to round out the stainless steel. The power of positive thinking failed me, though, and the microwave died first. So here we are. Shopping for a microwave.

Microwaves are really hard to get excited about. Even the things you make in them aren’t all that exciting. They warm up your leftovers and your coffee, pop the occasional bag of kettle corn, and that’s really a day in the life. So we weren’t looking for bells & whistles. We wound up with this fairly basic GE Profile model. It works pretty much just like the old one, except the buttons are huge – it’s like the geriatric large print edition. Not the worst thing for a device sometimes used to warm up coffee in the morning…

Anyway, we lugged it home and then the fun started. It’s a lot easier to get one of these down if you’ve seen what’s back there once before! So since I’m a sharer, this is what the bracket behind one of these bad boys looks like:

Four little up-turned brackets on the bottom that the back of the microwave rests on, and two bolts that go up into the cabinet above. To the extent that you can see the screws on the bottom horizontal piece, that’s where the studs are.

We were almost lucky enough to use the old bracket, but it was rectangular rather than U-shaped, and got in the way of the exhaust vent. We had to enlarge the cutout in the wall to accommodate it as well.

After a little wrangling, here we are:

This is the point where I question whether it’s an “improvement.”

It works, so of course it is, but this is not an awesome angle.

Even after I killed our bottle of Windex on the range, the microwave just looks so shiny next to it.

I keep telling myself to back up: the new microwave does go well with the other appliances (which are not GE, but Kitchen Aid — the handles match so nicely though!)

Eventually we’ll buy a range to match, and the whole kitchen will coordinate. Now that will be an exciting appliance purchase. For now, though, we’ll just go back to enjoying our microwave kettle corn!